OBJECTIVE Social withdrawal is described as the condition in which an individual experiences a desire to make social contact, but is unable to satisfy that desire. It is an important issue for patients with motor neurone disease who are likely to experience severe physical impairment. This study aims to reassess the psychometric and scaling properties of the MND Social Withdrawal Scale (MND-SWS...

The joint analysis of responses and response times in psychological tests with latent trait models has become popular recently. Although numerous such models have been proposed so far there are only few tests of model fit. In this manuscript a new approach to the evaluation of model fit is presented. The approach is based on the differences between the observed frequencies of positive or negati...

There are two currently popular statistical frameworks for addressing measurement problems namely Classical Test Theory (CTT) and Item Response Theory (IRT). This study is aimed empirically to examine the similarities and differences in the parameters estimated using these two frameworks. For this purpose, firstly the model assumptions and the goodness of fit analyses were checked for IRT. The ...

OBJECTIVE Advances in health measurement have led to the application of Rasch Item Response Theory (IRT) analysis (Rasch analysis) to evaluate instruments measuring health status and quality of life of patients, including the Health Assessment Questionnaire and SF-36. This study investigated the extent to which the Western Ontario MacMaster osteoarthritis questionnaire (WOMAC) satisfies the Ras...

BACKGROUND The Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (PACIC) 20-item questionnaire measures how chronic care patients perceive their involvement in care. We aimed to adapt the measure into Danish and to assess data quality, internal consistency and the proposed factorial structure. METHODS The PACIC was translated by a standardised forward-backward procedure, and filled in by 560 patient...

BACKGROUND The Ruminative Response Scale (RRS)-short form is one of the most widely used measures of rumination, comprising ten items and two components: reflection and brooding. The aim of this study was to investigate RRS validity and reliability in a clinical sample of French patients with major depressive disorder (MDD). SUBJECTS AND METHODS Outpatients with a DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of MDD w...

OBJECTIVE The purpose of this present study was to investigate the psychometric properties of the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy - student version (JSPE-S). SUBJECTS AND METHODS This study recruited 193 Malaysian medical students enrolled in year one and year two studies. A principal-component analysis with Varimax rotation was conducted. Procrustes rotation was used to confirm the item...

While the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory has been widely used, there have been few studies assessing its factorial validity. There is evidence that the original instructions and response options are difficult to understand. Using simplified instructions and response options, the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory was administered on a sample of 1514 participants using an online questionnaire. In ac...

purpose the present study investigated the psychometric properties of a malaysian adapted brunel mood scale. methods the questionnaire was administered to 355 young sport athletes with a mean age of 14.69+1.70 years. confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) and cronbach's alpha were used to determine the factorial validity and the internal consistency of the questionnaire respectively. results cfa re...